June 10, 1990 | SARAH HENRY, Sarah Henry is a staff writer with the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. Melanie Best provided research assistance.

THE TROUBLE BEGAN in an empty patients' room on the third floor of the Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. Aida Dimaranan, an assistant head nurse on the maternity ward, was taking a dinner break. She didn't want to get too far from the busy unit, so she and two other Filipina nurses sat on the beds, sharing a quick meal and swapping stories about their children's latest antics. They spoke quietly in Tagalog, a language of the Philippines.

Most Californians are optimistic about ethnic relations and agree that reducing crime and improving education and job prospects should be at the top of the state's agenda, according to a survey by a San Francisco-based think tank released Wednesday. Yet the survey by the Public Policy Institute showed marked disagreement among ethnic groups on such issues as affirmative action, immigration and racial profiling of suspects by police.

Two NAACP chapters have demanded the ouster of Norton Air Force Base Commander Col. David A. Voight because he walked out of a black-sponsored dinner during the singing of the so-called Negro national anthem. Voight said he left the Feb. 27 dinner-dance after seeing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written in 1901 by black leader James Weldon Johnson and originally performed to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday, billed on the program as the Negro national anthem.

"Where you going?" the cops asked the teenager lugging his schoolbooks along Vermont Avenue one afternoon last week. "What are you doing?" They pointed to his UC Berkeley cap and clothes, all blue--a color often favored by local gang members. And they said: "You look suspicious." They let him go with a warning, but later that day Wylie Jason Tidwell III, 17, became livid while telling the story to friends. "Suspicious? Me? Why, because I'm black?"

The numbers tell the stark story. In California and across the nation, the percentage of blacks is expected to increase only incrementally in future years, compared to vast leaps by the Latino population and continuing domination by whites. For black politicians, that leaves one option: molding coalitions in either racially mixed or white-dominated areas. While black politicians are optimistic about forming coalitions, the realities are troublesome.

Gov. George Deukmejian's proposed 1989-90 state budget would virtually eliminate a new program to combat crimes generated by bigotry--a program that the Republican governor publicly praised just last month.

Now at the last weekend before the election, and with a watershed civil rights proposition awaiting decision, Californians seem in no mood to tear themselves apart over their differences. Proposition 209 is a ballot measure to repeal the 30-year-old civil rights principle of affirmative action in state and local government. An amendment to the California Constitution, it would outlaw preferences based on race or gender in government employment, contracting and education.

Gov. George Deukmejian said Thursday that his three appointees to the California Bicentennial Commission will remain on the board even though they endorsed the sale of a book containing racially insulting terms like "pickaninnies" as a fund-raising device. The Republican governor, in a statement released by his office, said he is satisfied with the commission's public apology.

On the eve of a trial that might have aired the growing resentment of some American workers toward their Japanese bosses, two Americans who ran a Silicon Valley electronics firm agreed Thursday to settle a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against their Japanese former employers. Thomas McDannold and Edward A. Neubauer had charged that NEC Electronics, a Mountain View, Calif.

Here is cause for a double take: At least two out of three voters say they favor a June ballot initiative to end bilingual education, but not one of the major candidates for governor--Democrat or Republican--supports it. Don't they care what voters want? Usually such popular measures have little trouble winning endorsements from candidates eager to boost their campaigns.

In choosing California as the site for his long-awaited speech on racial conciliation, President Clinton picked the state often touted as the multihued model of an ever-changing America. "It's not accidental that the speech is being given in California," senior White House advisor Rahm Emanuel said of the commencement address Clinton will deliver today at UC San Diego. The White House views the event as a landmark moment in the second term.

Now at the last weekend before the election, and with a watershed civil rights proposition awaiting decision, Californians seem in no mood to tear themselves apart over their differences. Proposition 209 is a ballot measure to repeal the 30-year-old civil rights principle of affirmative action in state and local government. An amendment to the California Constitution, it would outlaw preferences based on race or gender in government employment, contracting and education.

Almost three hundred years ago the French author Voltaire wrote that fear follows crime and is its punishment. I think that's why Proposition 187 won on Tuesday and why, if it is ever implemented, we'll all suffer. Crime has everyone living on the edge. We exist in a society vaguely out of control. Children are slaughtered by their mothers and old ladies are murdered in their homes. Terror blankets us like a funeral shroud.

No one talks about it. But beneath a landscape dominated by crime, immigration and welfare reform, politics in California this year is riven by a silent fault line. Race. None of the candidates overtly appeal to prejudice. Everyone denies even suggesting racial themes. But social scientists believe the undercurrent is implicitly there, looming large from the anti-illegal immigrant Proposition 187 to the emphasis on crime that has recently dominated the governor's contest.

On the morning after the verdicts, a television had been placed behind the counter of the Kountry Folks coffee shop. As they ate their eggs, the patrons could watch Los Angeles burn. They watched with the detached bemusement of a zoo crowd. "Look at them," one man said. "They are just burning out their own." Them. "I heard," a counter-mate said, "they're coming over the hill to burn us." Us.

The chairman of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors is under fire for launching an anti-Japanese tirade at a ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. "I'm getting sick and tired of these Japs trying to take this country over," said Supervisor James Bucher, 60, during the presentation of a memorial plaque earlier this week to survivors of the Japanese attack. "They'll do it one way or the other . . . through their sneak attacks or through their dollars.